My Safari to Dar

Hello everyone! There are many things I want to catch you up on now that I have better internet connection, but I figure I'll first do anything that comes up as it comes up. So I got to spend a long weekend having a little safari (safari=Kiswahili for journey, regardless of where to and if there are big scary animals to see) to the big city of Dar es Salaam. Dar is the main city of Tanzania, on the coast, no longer officially the capital but still functioning as the place where almost everything important is based/done. It has a few million people, so it's pretty big- and my city Mwanza is the next biggest with only some hundreds of thousands of people- like the difference between Toronto and Kitchener-Waterloo, but with much greater distance between and with KW looking much worse and with much less going for it. :) I went to Dar to visit Len and Marilyn Mittelstaedt, a missionary couple I met first in Mwanza 2 years ago, their family and mine go way back. While there I got to see the city and have fun/relax. While there, I got to see the downtown, which is pretty impressive and big (very impressive compared to Mwanza's downtown), go to the National Museum, visit the wood carvers at the Mwenge Carver's Village (where you can actually watch people carve all the wooden carvings you see in tourist shops across the country- but here you can get very nice ones direct from the source, and with good prices given my increasingly bold bargaining), check out the University of Dar es Salaam, meet some students and hang out with them, see the Kaole ruins including a 13th/14th century mosque, and visit Bagamoyo, a sleepy old historic town that has almost no importance anymore but still has old buildings like the fort the Germans built at the end of the 1800s. (i.e. history-buff heaven...) And of course relaxing and enjoyin the company of my friends Len and Marilyn and go to church where they are pastoring now. All in all, I had an amazing time... but I was glad to leave the heat and get back to Mwanza where it isn't nearly as hot, although still much hotter than Canada where I hear it is snowing. :( Stephen is sad to be missing the snow.